I’ve been away for a while. Away from my blog, that is. I got a little behind on things in mid-January and kept putting off a new post, even though I’ve had a variety of ideas to share. By early February, the blog turned into the equivalent of a friend that you were supposed to keep up with but got behind on, and then you get even more behind because you felt bad about getting so far behind. It sort of feeds on itself. But finally, you crank up your resolve and decide to fix the situation.

This behavior is fairly typical of introverts, and I almost define the term! Here is a quote about it:

And when someone who an introvert has categorized as a “true friend” seems to be in danger of falling into “acquaintance” territory, the introvert can begin to have gnawing feelings of guilt, even shame, at the idea of “abandoning” the friend . . . guilt is accompanied by anxiety, the fear that the person in question has taken the extended silence of the introvert as evidence of how lightly their friendship was regarded . . . in an effort to avoid the awkwardness that a long-delayed communication can create, the introvert may choose to let the friendship die the long, slow death of silence, instead.

Yea, that is kind-of what has happened to me and my old friend, this blog. But maybe it’s time to re-boot. So I’m back.

As for all of my great ideas needing to be written up and shared — well, somehow the world has gotten by without them for the past few months. Nonetheless, here are a few topics that I hope to address in the next few weeks. I still have been struggling with the night, not getting enough sleep. I’ve tried a lot of over-the-counter remedies, and I want to share some thoughts about which ones help and which ones don’t, for me anyway. Also, I don’t stay up with the latest movies, but I finally got around to watching Interstellar, about 4 years after it came out. And I was quite surprised by it, it was quite different than I had thought – it was actually a spiritual sci-fi space movie!! OK, maybe 2000 had its spiritual aspects, but Interstellar was a full-blown spiritual message movie.

I also caught up with Arrival, another space invasion sci-fi with some spiritual twists to it. I’m glad that the genre of artistic spiritual sci-fi seems to be taking root. I hope that there will be more in the near future.

I’ve also been pondering modern theories of consciousness. I’m still trying to get a grip on the integrated information / phi theory of Tononi and Koch. One interesting thought that I had about it was to relate IIT and Phi to the “strange loop” concept that Douglas Hofstadter tried to couch consciousness in some years ago, in his book “I Am A Strange Loop”. A “strange loop” is sort of an abstraction representing a loop-like set of relationships that seems a bit contradictory. It is a situation where there is a chain of relationships amid a group of individual things, whereby these individual things have been given some sort of ranking in terms of importance. Like maybe in the military, with soldiers, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, colonels, and generals. The entities with the lowest importance interact with the things next up on the ranking scale, and then that thing interacts with its own boss, on and on up the “ladder”.

Then there’s that new mental concept called “free energy“, which is being called a “unified brain theory”. It may say a lot about how our minds work and why they do what they do, but I’m not sure that it opens up many doors with regard to consciousness itself. But then again, it is still opening doors, so maybe it will have something to say before long

More on all that, coming soon! Also, I have a lot of thoughts on Zen, and why it just doesn’t seem to be working for me anymore — well, actually, when everyone is quiet, it works just fine. It’s when the teachers start teaching and the students start making noise, that’s when things start to backfire.

And I have a new camera (actually a new USED camera) with a long telephoto lens, so hopefully I will have some new pix to post before long.